Two days ago old versions of biblatex were purged while updating the dependencies (purge commit: 7b6cefcd0a3e75e9592d18dac2da98ff3db36809, dep update commit: 72242702ce970a0fe4f6d278ed4c1ed2acb399b5) During that old versions were removed without asking the maintainer (me). These were kept for a reason. 3.7-r1 was for example a stabilisation candidate (#626616). Please revert the removal, applying the dep changes to these ebuilds as well.
What about destabilizing it or stabilizing 3.10 instead ? I mean, it's been broken in stable for 5 months and 3.10 has been around for 6 months. It would also make sense to finish bug #494542 and get this more properly synced with texlive releases so that it does not magically break when texlive is updated.
That is not so easy as it is linked to a specific version of dev-tex/biber which requires relatively new versions of perl and even newer versions of Unicode-Collate. 3.7 could be stabilised once perl-5.26 becomes stable. The newer versions will require the next release of perl (or a change in the policy of the perl team regarding stabilisation of perl-core packages). Putting biblatex into texlive is a great idea, but due to the perl-deps of biber it is difficult to keep up-to-date (at least in stable). Having it without biber is pointless in my opinion. I am not really happy with the situation as it is right now. My plan was to have an old version for every perl-release, which could be stabilised once the corresponding perl is stable. I will go through the releases and check if we could use something like 3.8, but 3.10 will not work. I kept 3.9 for some time as 3.10 contained some breaking changes, so users could go beak if necessary. But thats some time ago, so 3.9 can go away.
I created a PR to resolve this: https://github.com/gentoo/gentoo/pull/9348 I think it should fix this. I double checked that 3.7 is indeed correct. 3.8 requires biber-2.8, requiring perl-Unicode-Collate-1.120.0 which is not part of perl-5.26. Because of this anything newer than biber-2.7 can only be stabilised once perl-5.28 is stable (or perl-Team changes its policy about stabilising perl-core packages).
is there any real reason to biber requiring so recent perl packages ? from what I found on biber's github repo this seems mostly that upstream is always requiring latest versions without any real need there
For me it is hard to tell. I don't know much about perl. The tests fail when using older versions, but they also do when using newer versions of Unicode-Collate. On a first look biber works with older versions, but I can't know for sure.
So what's the consensus here? Should I merge the corresponding PR?
As I can not rigorously check or guarantee that packages work with older versions of Unicode-Collate than specified by upstream, yes please do. If we find another solution for this issue it should be easy to purge the versions again.
